


Dropping Bombs

by noisystar



Category: BioShock, BioShock Infinite
Genre: 1958, Fontaine is Dead, Rising Atlas, canonical
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-21 23:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3707739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noisystar/pseuds/noisystar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andrew Ryan ordered an end to Fontaine, and in the ensuing distress, the Rapture Central Council seized all Fontaine industry.</p><p>As Andrew erodes his vision of utopia, the people of Rapture become estranged, and with their leader dead, Fontaine's army falls apart. </p><p>The battleground is burning, and this emerging Atlas figure might be his only ally.</p><p> </p><p>  <i>As the light peeled off the man's back, there was a queer inflection of shadows across the bated malice in Atlas' face; Ryan had the disjointed feeling he was being pinned under the glower of a spiteful mistress.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Heroic Rescue

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this forever ago. But I keep thinking about what I want to do with this story! So here's hoping I get the time to continue it!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Andrew Ryan finds himself in a situation he never could have imagined.

Rapture had been Andrew Ryan's vision. It was a glowing reef of sculpted metal, a fortress risen from the depths on the caryatids and telamones of monumental industrialists who held fast in the free current of the ocean. Rapture was a city of people, not buildings or society. Individuals constructed and carried their own independent worlds under the pediment of Rapture, not the pediment of a dictator. There was no battleground for politics, no throne, no White House. Rapture was a monolith, cast from the single principle that man was entitled to the sweat of his brow.

He had seen Rapture with such clarity, had lived it, had held it in his hands. Now the city around him had become something foreign, something strange. A battlefield had been laid and suddenly there were enemies of Rapture, threatening its integrity. When did the people who had arrived as business magnates become pillagers?

The creak of strained metal pressed on all edges of his head, as though he were made of the alloy that became frail under pressure of renegade structures. The vision of a chain pulled taut filled his consciousness, trembling and fracturing between two tugging bodies. _The Great Chain_ , pulling, and himself, cracking--

Andrew Ryan emerged as if from briny depths into consciousness, choking on his breath. He thrust violently around for awareness, his salted eyes gulping the scene around him.

He was surrounded by faces of Valdimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks, jeering at him with threats taken from memories of Russia in his head; “The proletariat will rebel against the world!” “The bourgeois will surrender their exploited profits to the Communist movement!”(1) In an instant he was again the confused child that had nothing, and yet people kept taking.

Blinking the sting of ocean breath from his eyes, the faces of the hallucinated Bolshevik raiders took the shape first of dealers from Washington, and then solidified into the present as the Rapture proletariats, their threats begging the same effect: “Take all his precious property, we'll turn it into businesses of the people!” “We're gonna take back what he seized of Fontaine's business, and force him into destitution, see how he likes it!” Statements of the same nature carried through the incommodious room. No one, all engaged in their wasted gibes, had noticed him as yet, and Andrew Ryan wondered as he wrested himself from a cold lethargy whether he was really there. _Where_ , the apt question, was _there_? Something similar to the heavy pressure that throbbed in his head bound the rest of his body; was he being compressed inside a Street Sweeper's Daughter(2), his KGB-inspired paranoia asked. No; binding him from knee to shoulder were clumsy layers of thick, spiny rope, bound so tightly that his limbs were numb and inert. He saw, caked into the twine, the sodden, rotting burgundy of old blood.

A brackish panic lobbed like acid from his stomach and he pitched forward, his eyes sucked back into his head where the chains rattled and clashed and worsened his nausea. A faint shape fastened on one shoulder as he struggled from the plea of sleep.

He was yanked back by the shape--a spindly hand--on his shoulder, as if a fish cleaved on the end of a fishing wire. “Whoa moneybags, don't go upchucking now. _We're_ the ones that have to clean your goddamned puke, and I tell you, we're all pretty sick of that.” The hissed voice was clamorous at his ear. Through his putrid headache, Andrew Ryan realized where he was. These were the parasites of Rapture, turned on him by the deformed humanitarian philosophy that was spawned by the actions of men like Fontaine. They had him subdued in a closet-sized headquarters, in a location he surmised to be related to the district in which he last had consciousness—if he could recall through his current stupor. He had been with Bill McDonagh, walking through what used to be Fontaine's Department Store, which had been acquired in recent days by the Rapture Council after Fontaine's death. They had been discussing its reformation. Truly, Bill had warned him that the denizens of Rapture would not accept the Council's seizure of Fontaine's assets, but what choice had he, when the very ones who would inherit Fontaine's assets would also inherit his penchant for criminal hustle? This barbaric assembly, for example.

One of them now caught sight of Ryan as a sour gripe clenched his stomach, much in the same way he clenched at his dignity. “Hey! How long has Ryan-the-Lion been awake, Tommy?” 

The boy intimate at Ryan's ear clamped his hands on him, like a boy would a prize he refuses to share, and Ryan squirmed in disgust. “Shhh, Vallette. I've got him handled.”

Ryan watched as the rest of them stuck their eyes on him like gnats to honey, despite Tommy's effort to remain hushed. The ensuing chatter confirmed the futility of order among parasites.

“C'mon now, let's just kill the sunuva bitch.” A peck of others swelled to endorse the man who said this. 

"Wait!" A woman interjected. “You can't kill him, not yet. Atlas needs to see him.”

“Yes, Elise is right.”

“ _Atlas?_ Odds are he'll want the same, anyway. Maybe I'll let you have what's left of his head. You can gift-wrap it for your precious Atlas.” The man drew a hefty syringe from a pouch and, with unanticipated hysteria, plunged the needle into his wrist as a deranged grin made his face ugly and inhuman. His hand became engulfed in flames that ignited from nothing and burned on impervious flesh; a weapon, Ryan grasped, meant for a slow and painful murder. This stirred a frenzied contention among the rest of the room, throughout which Ryan felt disembodied--how could this be _real_ \--until the cold lip of a gun clunked against Ryan's head. A superfluous debate became animal cacophony; Kill him _this_ way; No, torture the bastard and make him suffer; No, let's have him meet our demands. Meanwhile, the contempt that made the flame-wielding man's face even uglier as he and Tommy grappled between a fate at the flames and a fate at the bullet inspired, as his only reachable emotion, a dry humor in Ryan. Even when they agreed on killing him, still they could not agree.

“You kill him, and if I don't get to you first, Atlas will make you regret it. He doesn't take kindly to spit-brained meddlers.” The woman called Elise said to both of the brutes.

“What, like this is Atlas's fight of hallowed destiny? I'm plenty angry at Ryan myself enough to have my own war!” The flames billowed giddily from the man's fist, and Ryan heard the twinge of a mechanism by his ear; a nervous finger on a trigger.

An approaching voice slipped under the door. “-got to be puttin' one on. How anyone could get their hands on old Ryan through his plump lines of sentinels is ludicrous-” The door opened, and the people cramming the room now crammed themselves further against the walls, as if compelled by some transcendent obligation to create a dais for the man that now entered.

Atlas had frozen to the spot in half-stride, his arm still stretched out to the door he came in from, and he masticated on the scene of Andrew Ryan; Andrew Ryan found himself equally agog. The man called Atlas had an undeniably startling presence. His power was reflected in the corners of the eyes that beheld Andrew; even when an astonished gape compromised his intensity, his face remained an appealing device made up of soft protrusions carved somehow into a steadfast shape. He could have been a perfect Roman sculpt given life, his straight nose and protruding lip uncovered by the battering of a stone. 

What was only a second of time had been stretched to a suffocating length under the shrewd eyes of that man; but it must have been only one second before Atlas snapped onto the brute with the handful of fire. Atlas swung the man's arm up and out of line with Ryan, a ray of flame arching to the ceiling. Then, as if by direction, two men who had followed Atlas unleashed identical fountains of frost simultaneously, one extinguishing the flaming hand and the other trapping the gunman's hand in an icy bond, pistol and all. “What in Jesus' name you think you're about to do? Think offin' the man's gonna give you a hayride to a smug penthouse?” His voice was the mellow bell of a comforting Irish timbre ringing in a jarring and foreboding rhythm. 

The parasites erupted with clamor as Andrew Ryan regarded Atlas, with reserved suspicion, as a disarm-er of his would-be assailants. Still his thoughts struggled for clarity under the symptom of pain, and as he found strength with which to look him in the eye, Atlas's hand came fast across his face and sent Ryan reeling back into a murky unconsciousness.

 

(1) Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917. Think a hill of ants rallying to overpower their grasshopper lords: the ants are peasants rallied by dudes with influence, including Vladimir Lenin. Grasshoppers are the Tsar/Emperor.

(2) Street Sweeper's Daughter – torture device that compacts the body to fatal extremes.


	2. To Make Amends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rapture Central Council members McDonagh and Sullivan deal with political fallout, while Atlas picks up where he last left off with Andrew Ryan.

The past hour may as well had been scanty minutes, as Bill McDonagh saw it. Not one blink ago was he standing next to Andrew Ryan in Fontaine's old Department Store, and then there was the flash of human screams and a stampede—then the stretch of his fingers, reaching for the hand that was already gone.

“Hey, McDonagh, you with me? Tell me what the hell happened back there.” Bill blinked again and he was lying in a hospital bed, and beside it stood Ryan's Head of Security, Sullivan.

“I don't know,” Bill said, woebegone. “A Big Daddy went blazen mad... Came right towards us, knocked the bloomin' daylight out a' me, but Ryan just disappeared... I tried to tell his bodyguards to go after him, but...” Bill shook his head and scrubbed a hand over his sore, blue-and-purple face.

Sullivan looked with sober apprehension at Bill through his droopy, watery bowls-for-eyes. “Half his detail's got even uglier injuries than you. Did ya happen to get a look at any of the splicers?”

Bill recalled the spider-web of lightning that had blinded the room. The old folds of his face crinkled with desperation. “No. Dammit, that old sod, I told him it wasn't right for him to be prancing 'round Fontaine's old shops after he nationalized it, and now look where it's got him. That stupid, fucking arse.” The slander was as affectionate as it was obscene, and the bite of the effrontery was meant for himself; right before the attack, Bill had been making to talk resignation from the Rapture Central Council. But he focused on the facts, and the pieces were falling into no coincidental shape. “If them splicers got a' hold a' him... Sullivan,” Bill brooded, “This was planned.”

“My boys are giving the store a long once-over,” Sullivan said, indicating he was already a step ahead of McDonagh. “We got some of Private Forces on clean-up duty, and we're going to be questioning every soul who was there--”

“No.” Bill interrupted, his glossy eyes moving from an invisible realization to hold Sullivan firmly in place. “No, you can't question them... you can't question anybody.” He digested the suspicious arch of Sullivan's brow. “Listen to me. The people of Rapture... they can't know. _We_ cannot let them know. Rapture needs to go on, and it will go on just as he planned... we'll give out Fontaine Industries to those it was supposed to go to, and under Ryan's endorsement... We'll persevere through this. And nobody," He paused with an emphasizing breath; "...needs to know.”

Bill saw Sullivan's expression slide from sympathetic to wary, and the rigidity of a trained interrogator tightened his features. “Yeah. Right....”

“Don't start thinkin' I'm a part of this, Sullivan. I'd be the first to take a bullet for Mr. Ryan." McDonagh tracked after Sullivan's train of thought to squash the notion he saw about to sprout. "But, Sullivan, if this gets out, it'll be outright chaos,” Bill rationalized, feeling the idea out for himself. “People won't have faith in us, and they won't have faith in Rapture. There'll be no saving it then.”

“Yeah? What about the men who were on Ryan's guard detail, and the men searching for him as we speak? They'll go home, talk to their families, their friends...” Sullivan planted the obstacles and let them grow, but he was leaning towards Bill, half inclined to the idea.

“That's just it. We won't let them go home.” Bill said it achingly, but this plan was picking up confidence quick. “You'll hold 'um for questioning, keep 'um on emergency duty, do whatever you can to buy us some time.”

Sullivan sighed, leaned back, rubbed a hand over his face and into his receding hair. “Word is, there's cold blood splitting the numbers of Fontaine's old outfit. I heard there's something going on in Persephone, too, ever since Ryan had Sofia Lamb put up there. And some kid no one's ever heard of started giving anti-Ryan sermons in the Square, and even some of the boys think he's got a point. I know it... if Ryan dies, it's a splicer-scramble to the big chair - we saw a sampling of it when we took down Fontaine. But how's covering up his murder going to stop anything?”

Bill cringed at Sullivan's use of the word _murder_ , but pressed on, fearless. “Because, we're gonna go back to the roots. It was Fontaine who changed Ryan, screwed with his marbles. Ryan laid down with the dogs, so he rose up with the fleas. Now that crook's gone, and we got time to put things back the way they were before Ryan ever knew the name Fontaine. Back to the great philosophy that created the Rapture that these people were once in love with.”

Bill hoped the bowed pull of Sullivan's mouth meant he was convinced, in his shy-of-letting-on-about-it way. Before he could be sure, the voice of Sander Cohen barked from the hall.

“Tell me where he is! Andrew, where are you? Where- don't touch me, this is Japanese silk! Calling on Andrew Ryan--” The door to the room was opened by a white-gloved hand, and leaning into it was the dolled-up personage of Sander Cohen. “Bill McDonagh!” He sang, and his eyebrows bounded up his forehead. “Take me to see Andrew Ryan, so I may show him beauty in his pain.”

Bill took a mental breath; Cohen was the first test of his ability to carry out his resolve. He could handle this, he could. “Wh-what?” He stuttered hopelessly.

Cohen's mouth and mustache were two heavy frowns. “You silly hairy buffoon, the fiasco that's all over the radio. Our beloved liberator, caught in the red sights of a charging Daddy. The tragic fool, I must speak to him.”

His back to Cohen, Sullivan awarded Bill a look that easily conveyed, _pal, looks like the jig is up_. Stubborn and a bit defiant, Bill sat up straight in his bed.

“Mr. Ryan is fine. You can calm down. But he's not seeing anyone, alright?”

“I... am Sander Cohen.” He announced softly, expectant.

Bill felt as though he were treading on the dangerous territory of a mad man's thin patience. “...Look, I get what you're feelin', I do. He doesn't want to see me either. He doesn't want to see you, he doesn't want to see anybody.”

“Not _anybody_?” Cohen persisted.

Scraping for support, Bill supplied, “Nope. Not even Diane. After the trauma he's gone through, he needs a bit a' time to himself. Don't you think he deserves that?”

Cohen tapped his fingers in displeased contemplation along the doorframe. Finally, he swayed dramatically, swiping the back of his hand across his forehead in a theatrical gesture. “Oh, dear, the burden of an artist's muse. But I too have had my affairs with solitude, as Andrew knows. I shall wait, as a bunny waits for a voice to perk its ears...” He bowed his head back to the earth, leering at Bill and Sullivan as though there was wisdom beyond the simple words; “It is a great deed, that Andrew has loyal friends such as us. Well wishes.”

Bill mumbled a fuddled, “Thanks, he'll be sure to appreciate it,” and Cohen departed, a trail of nurses who had been standing behind him following him in a motley of resentment and star-struck fascination.

Sullivan was none-too-quick to round on Bill. “So, what is it you plan to do about Miss McClintock?”

“We'll manage it when the time comes. For now, you've got more pressing matters, starting with the bodyguards.”

After a moment, Sullivan nodded. “I want you to understand somethin'. I ain't doin' this for you. I'm doin' this in the effort of national security. Once the city's clear of all these militia threats and I can lay down my head, I won't be doing you any favors.”

Bill answered with a sincere nod of his head. Sullivan turned to leave. “And Sullivan,” Bill warned, “we're at the bottom of the bloody sea. Bombs start going off in this city, and we'll all be buried with her under the rubble. We've got control of this, now we need to keep it. Rapture will thrive as she was always meant to, and no one will be the wiser that Andrew Ryan was ever kidnapped.”

Sullivan stood with his hand on the door, as though toeing the threshold of the strategy to save the city. Finally, he turned the knob and muttered over his shoulder, “Just get better soon.”

Bill watched him leave and then slumped back into his bed while releasing all the nervous air that had been stuck in his lungs. He had never considered himself a liar before, but this, he was certain, was what needed to be done. 

 

* * *

 

Ryan was wrenched out of a dreamless, suffocating sleep, one in which night had fallen and yet, in its merciless eternity, darkness would never come—and he emerged into the absurd blare of a beat laid into a piano and drum. The unfamiliar tune rammed his senses awake. Ryan jolted upright and for the second consecutive time, woke up as though he had been lying dormant in the bottom of the ocean for centuries. His surroundings undulated sickeningly like currents in the sea before settling into the shape of a narrow room. He moved his arms; they were sore and stiff, but he was unbound. Someone had deposited him on a small mattress, a gracious comfort in the ebb and flow of hysteria. As his vision focused enough to see across the room, he saw, outlined by the only source of light, the back of a man hunched over a desk.

The only movement was the spinning record, playing on the desk in front of the man. Its jovial tune filled the compact room from wall to wall. Ryan looked briefly around himself; there were mannequins sporting a variety of looks, wardrobes, and on the wall there was a pinned _Rapture Tribune_ page that caught his attention. The headline read _Frank Fontaine Killed in Shootout_ , and below was a photo of the title character himself. Ryan's throat was suddenly gorged in the acrid memory, and he wondered what that day's significance could be to his captor.

The man--Atlas--turned, and the shape of the light etched a yellow eye and half of a pensive expression out of his face. Eventually, his gaze, after climbing over intangible thoughts, linked like a mechanism into place with Ryan's. The gesture was like an abstract tug, and Ryan felt figuratively pulled into the chilling panic of this reality. Cold sweat tickled the skin around his eyes, but he refused to flinch as Atlas came towards him. As the light peeled off the man's back, there was a queer inflection of shadows across the bated malice in Atlas' face; Ryan had the disjointed feeling he was being pinned under the glower of a spiteful mistress.

Ryan watched Atlas walk methodically to his side and become increasingly hunched over him. When it seemed clear Atlas' mouth was going to remain a hardened line of brutal silence, Ryan made to unfurl his sodden tongue to make demands; then, the laborer's physique of Atlas dropped onto his knees in front of him. Ryan's mouth was broken open by a wet noise of protest and Atlas' hand wrapped around the back of his neck as if to hold him there, hostage. Between their faces Atlas wedged his other hand and stuffed the rolled bulk of a cigar into Ryan's mouth. It was distinctly not the flavor of seaweed.

The rambunctious music played on.

“Don't be getting too comfortable here, Ryan. We both got somethin' to gain by you stayin' alive, and your dogs will be _quick a' the mark_ huntin' you.” Atlas spoke directly into Ryan's face, the pads of his hand hot on Ryan's neck. The lighter that opened at the tip of the cigar appeared to brush Atlas' cheek in flame, and in the momentary light Ryan saw a bemused smile turn his profound lips.

“Like the song? Been in all the bars in the UK since 1950. Had it brought here meself, not too long ago, but never had the occasion to listen...” Atlas rocked his head to the music and matched the words of the song in his melting voice. As he sang, he moved. “You made-” Atlas rose from the bed- “-me cry.” He plucked the cigar out of Ryan's mouth- “When you said-” -Atlas squared a hand on the newspaper on the wall- “Goodbye.” He twisted the smoldering end of the cigar into the face of Frank Fontaine. The newspaper burned and curled into disintegration. “Ain't that a shame? Hm-hmm-hm-hm-hmm...” Atlas surveyed the charred image as he took a drag on the cigar, then sang along; “you're the one to blame...”

A sick feeling twisted in Ryan's stomach at the display; whatever meaning there was between this Atlas, himself, and Frank Fontaine, Ryan dreaded to contemplate. He didn't allow himself to make any analysis of the absurd vengeful-ex-lover lyrics. It was more sensible to assume Atlas was simply psychotic.

Ryan grunted pitifully when Atlas situated the cigar back into his mouth, the man's touch liberal on his lips. The entire behavior rang like the perversion of a couple's morning routine, especially when Atlas jerked straight Ryan's collar. Ryan stared at Atlas, battered out of composure. Was this some affiliate of Fontaine, carrying out some sick, satirical revenge?

Atlas withdrew from the mattress. “Enjoy the music, Ryan.” His face was again grim and bitter, and he exited the room through an abnormal sliding door. It closed with the telling click of a lock.

 

* * *

 

 

The wall slid into place with a bar counter over the entrance to his panic room and Atlas collapsed against it, panting furiously. _Hell_ if he was not the greatest con artist who ever lived! “ _The dogs will be_ quick off the mark _huntin' you?”_ He allowed himself a hysterical laugh. His voice abandoned the Irish charm for a Bronx drawl, “From whose shit do I get this kind of schmaltz? Not Frank Fontaine's...” He giggled alone in the corridor, mania traipsing his face, an interval between guises. The entire show he put on replayed in his mind: The song, the newspaper, the cigar. “Damned bastard,” He chastised as his giggle was broken by a cringe, and he buried his face in his hands to hide himself from the crawl of embarrassment. “You numskull bleeding bastard. Fuck up the whole sham. Damn it, you're walkin' on a tight rope for peanuts.” He dragged his face out from his hands, red-cheeked and irate, and stared at the wall on which the other side was Andrew Ryan. Putting himself in front of that man opened up old wounds, made him bleed from a soul he was not supposed to be anymore. It made him sentimental, it made him vulnerable, it made him insane. He may as well have started talking in his natural voice with all the hints he dropped, and if Ryan were to find out now who he really was, everything he worked for would amount to just that—peanuts.

Stakes were high, and only Atlas could bring in the whole kit and caboodle. As far as Andrew Ryan was concerned, that part of Frank Fontaine's life was burned up and snuffed out like an old cigar. He would just need to avoid anymore intimate soirees with Ryan to keep it that way.

Atlas composed himself with a tumbler of whiskey from the bar, and around the corner came a pale, older man into the small corridor. He was well dressed in a mustard yellow vest and pin-stripe pants, and his beard of white hair was neatly trimmed to frame his mouth and chin. “Atlas, we've received a few uninvited guests at the door,” He reported in a slow, sing-song voice.

Atlas finished his whiskey and wiped his mouth over his sleeve. “Knew this was comin'. Where's Lauderman?”

Following the cue, a woman pivoted in from around the corner. She wore teal, draped over the swathes of her black skin, and her hair was tamed into a neat bobble. They met each other at the private table between them known to common patrons as Lauderman and Fontaine's.

“I dunno what possessed you to bring the old man here,” She said in a closed voice. “It's not right for you to be hauntin' your old joints if you expect to keep your identity a secret. You probably even let them follow you right to this place, if I had to guess. Now I got splicers searchin' my restaurant for _Andrew Ryan,_ but then by some divine blessing _The Hero Atlas_ just gonna slip out a' crack, ain't you?” She accused, her smile street-wise.

“You know me well enough, lass,” He wrapped his words in a heavy, almost exaggerated Irish accent, emphasizing his choice identity. “But remember, ye are on me payroll to keep quiet as a corpse, Miss Lauderman. So if I were you, I'd be doin' jus' that,” He spoke all politeness, while the words themselves pricked like barbs.

“I've never let you down yet, _Atlas_.”

He nodded gravely. “That's how you earned this spot, and how you're gonna keep it. Now we need a distraction to move the cargo, so here's what you're gonna do. Take this,” Atlas drew a key from his pocket and folded it into Lauderman's hand; “and open up the case I left under the bar. Inside it, there's a Plasmid labeled Insect Swarm. Use it.”

“You gotta be kiddin' me, you know them things give me the heebie-jeebies,” Lauderman muttered as she eyed the key in disgust. “But I'll do it, since I like ya so much.”

“'Course you do. Get a move on.” Atlas maintained the feathery tone of a charmer while Lauderman wafted away, but a derisive austerity hardened his face as he turned back to the bearded man. “Lonnie, round up the rest, and make it quiet. Last thing we need's a riot to alert security.”

Lonnie concurred dreamily. “You won't hear anything but a pin drop.”

The two men strode into the adjacent room; it was a cozy, dimly-lit sitting area, mounted at the crest of twin staircases. Following Atlas's gesture, Lonnie descended the stairs and into the lavish valley of the club, from where a growl of voices escalated. To one side was the bar, where Lauderman was retrieving the Plasmid, and above it were the illuminated words _Manta Ray Lounge_. Scattered throughout the sitting tables were sluggish patrons, musing cluelessly over their drinks; among them were several sentry eyes, Atlas' loyalists, watching obediently from behind the cover of half-empty glasses.

The divergent splicers were well into their search, several of them gathering around the bar where a brutish woman barricaded their path. Up until now their perusal of the _Lounge_ had gone quietly; now the grisly bunch grew more frenzied and impatient. Their angry voices quickly became a clamor, several chants rising above the rest: “Come out you cowards, bring us Ryan!” “Ryan belongs to us!” “Who does Atlas think he is, anyway?” “Who _is_ Atlas?” “ _WHO IS ATLAS_?” They demanded. From behind the counter, Lauderman made some hapless appeal that the lot of them leave. If they didn't act soon, the splicers would be flipping tables.

Atlas snorted at the irony of it; his--Fontaine's--own army of resentful toilet-scrubbers, now protesting against him like a bunch of blind boneheads. If they would not join his charge, they would be stamped out.

Behind him, Atlas' loyalists joined him one by one from the restaurant below, the last of them Lonnie. "Get ready lads," Atlas muttered, "and stay sharp. On my signal, we hoof it over to Test Drive."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Atlas plays is ["Ain't That a Shame?" by Fats Domino.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8KJe8Ugtd8&index=8&list=PLipajpopGOYE9qXuweiiYGdKSBzh8wdRC)


End file.
